Most blacks switched to the democrat party over New Deal elements brought in by Roosevelt administration. It had more to do with opportunities to get free stuff, highlighted further when LBJ offered "something to those n-words to get them voting for the democrats for 100 years"
Why do you call it "free stuff" when not everything is free? Social Security isn't free, you have to pay into it your entire working life until age 65. Same with Medicare. These aren't free, they are paid entitlements.
Pointing out that LBJ was a stodgy old Texas bigot with a flair for pragmatism doesn't negate the fact that he ended up doing something for a large part of the American population, a segment of people which I gather you have a great deal of hatred for.
Not my problem, and neither is LBJ, but just calling New Deal elements "free stuff" is flat out ignorant.
The New Deal was much more than a simple social contract to protect working poor, elderly, disabled and the destitute.
It was also a very complex set of regulations that harnessed the economy into a tool that SERVED working families first, oligarchs second, and yet somehow there were plenty of filthy rich people still walking around and enjoying their fortunes nonetheless.
And nothing that has evolved in the forty years since Reaganomics began the slow and methodical stripping away of the New Deal has ever matched the economic performance of the New Deal era...
NOTHING.
I was alive then, I grew up then, I benefited from the ordinary features of the New Deal in ways too numerous to count and my upbringing was not as working poor or in destitution at all. I grew up as ordinary middle class.
But I know what the cost of living was in the 1970's when I first went out on my own, and I knew what to expect from my thirty hours, even as a low wage student paying my way through school and working part time.
It was enough for a roof, enough to put gas in my old heap, enough to put food in my stomach and enough to get by.
I wasn't rich, I had "enough", that's all.
My upward mobility arrived as I graduated college, and it was swift and sure.
Ask anyone working at the starter jobs of today and living on their own if they have "enough"...enough to pay for health insurance, school, car payments, rent, utilities, ask them if they feel like they have upward mobility.
You can go from
1980 to today and if you try to compare the economy for the middle class
in any segment of those forty years to the years between
1947 and 1980, you will
NOT find any period where working class people could do
ANYWHERE near as well as they did during the New Deal era.
And the reason it even took so long for the New Deal to do what it promised to do lies in the history of the New Deal itself.
Even strict monetarists like Milton Friedman, who opposed the policies of the first phases of the New Deal, had this to say:
"...providing relief for the unemployed, providing jobs for the unemployed, and motivating the economy to expand ... an expansive monetary policy. Those parts of the New Deal I did support."
Conservative critics of the New Deal seem hell bent on ignoring that it built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles (1,100,000 km) of roads, 1,000 airfields and employed 50,000 teachers through programs that rebuilt the country's entire rural school system.
Furthermore, Eisenhower's CONTINUATION and EXPANSION of New Deal policies glorified liberal Republicanism by building an entire Interstate (and Defense) Highway System, electrifying the entire rural South, erecting several large hydro-generating dams, and modernizing our telecommunications system. He also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, enacted the National Defense Education Act and created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
He was perhaps the greatest Republican president of the twentieth century.